In January 2011, word arrived that Orson Welles' final unfinished film **The Other Side Of The Wind was slowly emerging from a messy rights issue and could be on its way to completion. Skip to today, and The New York Times reports that an LA production company has reached a deal.
Royal Road spent five years chasing down rights holders and had to negotiate a deal between the various competing parties: Welles’s long-time companion and collaborator, Oja Kodar; his daughter and sole heir, Beatrice Welles; and an Iranian-French production company, L’Astrophore.
“I am going to sign the contract,” Kodar tells the Times. “The catalyst is the hundred-year anniversary and everybody is moving in a kind of wave. When I finally see it on the screen, then I will tell you that the film is done.”
Wind stars John Huston as a Welles-ish, Hemingway-esque film director, throwing a party on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The narrative flashes backwards and forwards through events in his long life, and encompasses the points of view of journalists at the party who are intent on unravelling the director's macho persona. Peter Bogdanovich co-stars (much of the film was shot at his house, where Welles lived for two years), and the cast also includes Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol and Welles' long-term partner Oja Kodar.
Shooting and editing on The Other Side Of The Wind took place sporadically over several years, taking in Arizona, France, Holland, England, Spain, Belgium and MGM studios. Welles called it "96% complete" in 1972, and "on the brink of completion" in 1976. By 1979 Welles had edited about 40 minutes of the film, but then hit legal trouble over rights ownership. The unfinished negative has been in a vault in Paris ever since, with occasional rumblings of its re-surfacing.
The Showtime network had many of the rights problems ironed out by the late 1990s, but faced opposition from the Welles estate. Bogdanovich has been trying to assemble the film for years, and will now get his chance alongside long-time Steven Spielberg producer Frank Marshall.
“We will set up a cutting room and Peter Bogdanovich and I will assemble the film,” Marshall says. “We have notes from Orson Welles. We have scenes that weren’t quite finished, and we need to add music. We will get it done. The good news is that it won’t take so long because of all of the technology today.”
The Royal Road team will be raising funds and finding distributors for the film at this year’s American Film Market, due to kick off next month. If all goes well, the company is looking to screen it next year around May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’ birth.